A Working Group of the Advisory Committee to the NIH Director (ACD) recently completed an assessment of rigor, transparency, and translatability in animal research. The Working Group made recommendations to the ACD to improve experimental design, optimize translational validity, enhance training, and increase the transparency of research studies involving animal models.These recommendations build upon steps NIH has taken in recent years to improve the scientific rigor of the research it supports, including establishing a previous ACD working group in response to the 21st Century Cures Act and co-hosting a workshop focused on identifying the common opportunities in the scientific publishing arena to enhance rigor and further support research that is reproducible, robust, and transparent.

The most recent ACD recommendations include a call to improve complete reporting of results of vertebrate animal and cephalopod experiments by setting expectations for the use of the ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) checklist. The ARRIVE Essential 10 describes the information that the authors consider “the basic minimum to include in a manuscript, as without this information, reviewers and readers cannot confidently assess the reliability of the findings presented.” This checklist includes specific details about comparison groups and the experimental units, sample sizes, inclusion and exclusion criteria, randomization, blinding, outcome measures, statistical analysis methods, animals used, experimental procedures, descriptive statistics, and effect sizes and confidence intervals. In addition to the ARRIVE Essential 10, other methodological documentation and standards for reporting results have been developed by the research community and include CONSORT (for randomized trials) and MDAR (for the broader life sciences community).

In light of the ACD recommendations, NIH is taking this opportunity to encourage use of the ARRIVE Essential 10 Checklist in all publications reporting on the results of NIH-supported vertebrate animal and cephalopod research.

NIH also recognizes the shared responsibility among funders, research institutions, and publishers to enhance the rigor, reproducibility, and transparency of biomedical research. To this end, NIH encourages other stakeholders to help foster the use of reporting guidelines such as the ARRIVE Essential 10 in the preparation of all manuscripts reporting on vertebrate animal and cephalopod research. By working together as a community to promote the rigor, transparency, and translatability of biomedical research, we will move basic discoveries forward and turn these discoveries into prevention, treatments, and cures.

NIH notice>>